Pacific City pushed back

The highly anticipated Pacific City development promises to bring hotels, shopping, condos and more to a 32-acre chunk of land in the heart of downtown Huntington Beach. To the city government, it promises to bring in plenty of new tax revenue from sales and hotel stays.

But construction on the site appeared to grind to a halt over the summer, and both city officials and residents say they would like to know more about just how the transformative project is doing.

Developer Makar Properties said the project’s deadline is being pushed back a year, and they still need financing to build it because of a rocky economy. But Michael Gagnet, executive vice president of development, said the project was moving forward, and signs of that would be more clear over the next few weeks.

The city has had other problems with the developer — officials said Makar owes $22 million in fees that would go to pay for the Huntington Beach Senior Center as part of a complex deal to fund that project, though Makar representatives disagreed that they had missed a payment deadline. City leaders said they didn’t want to go to court.

“I don’t see any reason to believe we should file a lawsuit and say they didn’t meet the terms of an agreement,” City Councilman Keith Bohr said. “We want the development, they’re doing the work, and we don’t have that much leverage.”

John Sisker of the Pacific City Action Coalition, which opposed the developer on its plans for the development until it was approved, said he isn’t getting the answers he wants. Like many observers, he guesses economic troubles slowed the project over the summer months, but he said city officials should be telling him more.

“I’m sure the city knows what’s going on,” he said. “You can’t be the city and expecting $22 million and big projects and [from] the developer and not know what’s going on.”

Asked what would happen if those $22 million didn’t show up, Bohr said the Senior Center would likely be “dead in its tracks unless we could figure something else out.”

“This is the source,” Bohr said of the developer. “I’m quietly optimistic that they can get it done. They’re a major developer, and they’ve done this before.”

Makar representatives have been talking with city staff this week about the project and about the money, officials said.

When Sisker sent out an e-mail to the local discussion mailing list HB-Talk, he was taken aback by the number of people who wrote back, asking their own questions about the development, including rumors and suspicions about changes in what might be built.

“Everybody wants to know,” he said. “We all went through a good year of this on the approval process: plans, meeting, everything else. We want to know if the plans have changed.”

MICHAEL ALEXANDER may be reached at (714) 966-4618 or at [email protected].